


Hanging Out in Subspace

by PrairieDawn



Series: The Intelligence Catastrophe [2]
Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Basically an excuse for a massive infodump, Commander Helix is a big nerd, Fake Nonfiction, Gen, Science article for a periodical published in the late 24th century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 02:22:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13226157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairieDawn/pseuds/PrairieDawn
Summary: Commander Trelane Helix, Chief Engineer of the USS Bellerophon, explains several important regions of subspace and introduces the reader to some basic facts about Wayfinder culture.  He's not the most exciting writer in the world, but he's trying.Article is written roughly ten years after the Dominion War.





	Hanging Out in Subspace

When I was a kid, I did not understand just how big normal space, or what I would call bigspace, is. I hadn’t traveled outside the Helix Nebula, and within the Nebula, the subspace bands my family uses for communication transmit information instantaneously, at least from the point of view of a child. Light moving through bigspace travels much farther when moving from world to world than it does through subspace, meaning that information gathered from sources in bigspace is hopelessly out of date before it can travel even between systems very close to each other. Information can travel through subspace much more quickly, so a message traveling from Earth through subspace, for example, would be only a few weeks old upon reaching the Helix Nebula rather than dating from Earth’s seventeenth century CE, old Earth dating system. The circumstances surrounding my learning that fact are both embarrassing and a matter of public record.

The Wayfinder Consortium is a loose confederation of a few dozen communities of cloudform entities that grew up in response to the spread of the Federation through our currently shared space. Our alliance with the Federation is still young, less than three decades old. I am lucky enough to have grown up when our earliest interactions, fraught with misunderstandings and occasional tragedy on both sides, gradually grew into an alliance which is bringing great benefit to both of our cultures. It is hard to imagine two groups of beings more different than organic lifeforms and the cloud peoples of subspace, and I suspect most organics know very little about how Wayfinders live. I hope that over time, this will change as we spend more time in each other’s company, but for now I believe a little xenobiology is in order.

Wayfinders aren’t divided into species in the same way that most organic life forms are. Our physical traits are passed intentionally, by mutual agreement, to our children when we assemble them from our substance. A child may be born of roughly 8 to 14 parents of any number of different lineages with often markedly different physical properties. My own lineage includes two Medusans and three Drella, among others. We have a strong cultural preference for mating in even numbered groups, as many believe this to produce more stable offspring. Several of my parents blame their haste in producing me when there were only eleven of them for my unusual proclivities. 

We started noticing bigspace dwelling organics when they became capable of interstellar travel and started moving in on the places we prefer to call home, in particular planetary nebulae surrounding neutron stars and white dwarfs, the outer atmospheres of flare stars, and occasionally the upper layers of particularly energetic gas giants. We spend a fair amount of our time in normal space in these regions, as charged plasma is a primary source of food for many of us, and for almost all of us, these are the only places we can come together to breed.

While we obtain matter from bigspace, we travel and communicate via subspace. While on ship, I retain the bulk of my volume in one of about a dozen layers of subspace, three of which I can also use to operate the android puppet with which I operate ship systems and interact with most of my crewmates. If I did not locate myself primarily in subspace, I would fill roughly half of the ship’s interior volume. The telepathic frequencies I use to communicate with other Wayfinders occupy twenty-four other subspace channels, which, like other telepathic species, I can use either separately or in concert. Different species use different sets of channels, and in order for successful communication to occur, individuals must have access to at least one channel in common. The subspace channels used for FTL data transmission use a different set of bands which do not overlap with those used by organic life forms, but a few of the highest frequency subspace bands used routinely for data transmission overlap the lowest psionic bands used by silicon based sapients, positronic AIs and some Wayfinders.

It is this last overlap which led to the formation of the first treaties between cloudform entities and organics, as our use of the same communications bands caused interference which reduced effective range and increased static in ways that were inconvenient for all parties. The Medusans independently formulated one of the very first treaties between our peoples a century ago, long before the Wayfinder Consortium was founded. That treaty delineated specific subspace data transmission bands for Federation vessels to use and to avoid, as Wayfinder communication channels are fixed by our biology and cannot be changed as easily as programming a communications array. In exchange, the Medusans and eventually the Consortium as a whole worked with the Federation to improve communications between our species, such that now there are specific emergency subspace bands used by both Wayfinders and Starfleet, which Federation ships use to call for aid from Wayfinders and vice versa. Often Wayfinders will “hand carry” messages from ships in distress to nearby relays in order to boost weak signals.

As I mentioned before that we also travel physically through subspace. This makes our peoples among the rare exceptions to the rule that civilizations may only be contacted by the Federation if they are warp capable. As a rule, we do not build warp drives of our own, as our material substance is such that we cannot interact with ordinary matter efficiently, but as we move through subspace, we can easily match the cruising speed of a starship--I personally top out at Warp 5.4, but I’m out of shape.

Those of you who are familiar with my personal history may be confused by my statement that we do not ordinarily interact with normal matter. My family group grew up around the ruins of an ancient galactic civilization which retained vestiges of technology used to allow cloudforms to interact with normal matter. We had long used this technology to casually build planets and other objects--in fact the study of this technology led to major advances in the Federation’s matter replicators--and I had been unwisely given a matter generator for my own use, playing with it as a humanoid child might play with Minecraft on a holodeck.

My current puppet was produced by the same technology, which is being used now to improve relations between our peoples even further. To date, there are nine serving members of Starfleet who are cloudform, including two current Starfleet Academy cadets, all using variants of humanoid puppet bodies.

The subspace bands I have already mentioned comprise only a small fraction of those which exist. Those of us who travel subspace have begun cataloguing these in earnest now that our discoveries may be reliably stored on matter based data systems. Among a few interesting discoveries made by us or by organic explorers:

There is a region consisting of several subspace bands that is inhabited by a universe spanning network of fungus which is capable of transporting objects large distances across the universe. It is a wild jungle of a place, inhabited by many types of organisms, organic and not, and may well be one of several reasons why living things in this galaxy are all so closely related, as microbial life appears to be able to move from planet to planet much more regularly than might be expected if bolide impacts were the only source of genetic cross contamination. While it is possible for organics to use this region of space for rapid interstellar transits, Starfleet has not yet made the technology both safe for travellers and for the ecology of the fungal branes. The Fungal Superhighway is as fragile as an Earth rainforest. Wayfinders may travel there, but it is not the safest place to visit, so is mainly inhabited by naturalists and biologists studying the ecosystem. There are a number of bands adjacent to the Fungal Superhighway which have characteristics that impede the growth of the jungle, but will still accommodate quantities of solid matter. Some more advanced species appear to use these bands for storage or to expand the interior dimensions of objects extruded into normal space.

There is another set of subspace bands at very high frequencies, and consequently very compressed spatial dimensions, impervious to matter but not to energy patterns. Wayfinder family and mother weavings propagate through this space, as do the kinds of telepathic bonds formed among organic species. Some studies suggest that there are life forms which are made of thought alone and spend their existence in these subspace bands, some possibly emerging into bigspace on occasion to meddle in the affairs of matter based creatures. We do not know if the Q Continuum occupies one or more of these bands, but it is considered likely. Speculation also exists that the very highest frequency bands in this region may contain or even be composed of sapient beings of universe spanning range and power, equivalent to the greater gods most lifeforms postulate (as opposed to the myriad petit gods the galaxy appears to have in abundance) but this, too, is mere speculation.

Finally, there exists a set of subspace bands which intersect at an angle to the rest. Our current understanding of the laws of physics suggests that this intersection should cause the immediate destruction of all subspace bands, and thus the universe itself. The fact that this hasn’t happened is a subject of both relief and puzzlement among cosmologists. These bands occasionally capture regions of bigspace and dislocate them, either moving them far from their origin, or copying them and relocating the copy to another region in spacetime. This has resulted in many worlds with histories that are identical with another world up to a point, after which their histories diverge. 

Certain facets of this set of bands suggest the possibility that they are artificial. The Q claim they are neither responsible for the temporospatial dislocations nor willing to bring us into contact with the beings who did make them until we have become technologically capable of contending with them. The makers of the offset bands have been given the name Assiti, though their exact nature is unknown. Given that the Q, who believed us fully capable of managing the Borg, are hesitant to confront the Assiti, I tend to agree that the Assiti are a can of worms best left unopened.

**Author's Note:**

> Subspace bands are branes. (As in M Theory)
> 
> I made pretty much all of this up. It's been a long time since I saw the technical manual. Comments, quibbles, and questions are all welcome. Lengthy discourse on physics, real and imaginary is also welcome.
> 
> Comments and kudos make me curious about what you write.
> 
> The Assiti are from another fandom, but I suspect those jerks are messing with stuff all over the multiverse. Bonus points for the first person who identifies their fandom of origin.


End file.
